Benetton Ethics

Nick Cohen: Treachery at the FO, 2 July 1998

First Annual Report on Human Rights 
by Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
56 pp., April 1998
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The Great Deception 
by Mark Curtis.
Pluto, 272 pp., £14.99, June 1998, 0 7453 1234 9
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... were still cheering contrasts between the old and new regimes. The leftish Australian writer, Richard Neville, was quoted with approval: ‘There is perhaps an inch of difference between an Australia governed by Labour and an Australia governed by the right, but, believe me, it is an inch worth living in.’ Or as Charlie Whelan, Gordon Brown’s spin ...

For the Good of Our Health

Andrew Saint: The Spread of Suburbia, 6 April 2006

Sprawl: A Compact History 
by Robert Bruegmann.
Chicago, 301 pp., £17.50, January 2006, 0 226 07690 3
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... against suburbia, and a fortiori against sprawl, is that it abets segregation. Cities, if Richard Sennett is to be believed, are places where you are forced to learn tolerance and explore difference, whereas sealed in your car between home, mall and corporate campus you can hate away to your heart’s content. Bruegmann’s answer is that most things ...

Perfidy, Villainy, Intrigue

Ramachandra Guha: The Black Hole, 20 December 2012

Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt 
by Richard Gott.
Verso, 568 pp., £25, November 2011, 978 1 84467 738 2
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The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power 
by Partha Chatterjee.
Princeton, 425 pp., £19.95, April 2012, 978 0 691 15201 1
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... crimes of the British long after the empire has been abandoned. The latest to join the list are Richard Gott and Partha Chatterjee. Gott, who describes himself as ‘a historian in private practice’, has written a wide-ranging study of resistance to British rule in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, North America and the Antipodes. Some of the longest chapters ...

Keeping Score

Ian Jackman: Joe DiMaggio, 10 May 2001

Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life 
by Richard Ben Cramer.
Simon and Schuster, 560 pp., £20, April 2001, 0 684 85391 4
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... In the closing stages of Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of Joe DiMaggio there is an exchange between the baseball legend and a man called Cappy Harada for whom DiMaggio had done a bit of business. The episode is undated in the book, but took place some time before the San Francisco earthquake of 1989, at which time DiMaggio was 74 ...

Armageddon

Martin Woollacott, 3 July 1980

The Real War 
by Richard Nixon.
Sidgwick, 341 pp., £8.95, April 1980, 0 283 98650 6
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... to the point where the Soviet Union virtually has its strong and hairy hands around the delicate white neck of the West is another matter, and although Mr Nixon never quite says as much, he comes pretty close. What the West should never do is to deal with Soviet actions in a mood of panic that attributes to the Kremlin a confidence and design that it is ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’, 17 April 2014

The Grand Budapest Hotel 
directed by Wes Anderson.
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... All the paintings there were by Klimt and all the music by Mahler. No, there were also special Richard Strauss evenings, and the cafés played Johann Strauss waltzes all the time. Everyone was analysed by Freud, but it didn’t make any difference. They were very rich and they had terrific furniture. Many of them were waiting for a bit part in La ...

At Pallant House

Eleanor Birne: Pauline Boty, 6 February 2014

... Stained glass allowed her to make images that looked like collage, a form then very much in vogue: Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi had shown at the Whitechapel in 1956, incorporating pictures of movie stars, images of food packaging, snippets of consumer advertising. Boty made collages without support or encouragement from a tutor: one from 1959 shows a ...

Akihito and the Sorrows of Japan

Richard Lloyd Parry: The Anxious Emperor, 19 March 2020

... was seen by his subjects in photographs and newsreels wearing military uniform and mounted on a white stallion. His famous surrender broadcast on 15 August 1945 was the first time that most of them had heard his voice; many of those huddled around their radios had only a general sense of what he was saying because his stylised delivery and imperial diction ...

Our Cyborg Progeny

Meehan Crist: Gaia will save us. Sort of, 7 January 2021

Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence 
by James Lovelock.
Allen Lane, 160 pp., £9.99, July 2020, 978 0 14 199079 8
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... surface. Black daisies absorb heat so they thrive in these low temperatures. But there are mutant white daisies which reflect heat and, as the temperature rises even further, these begin to flourish. So Daisyworld is cooled by white daisies and warmed by black ones. A simple flower is able to regulate and stabilise the ...

Professor Heathrow

Neal Ascherson: Asa Briggs says yes, 9 October 2025

The Indefatigable Asa Briggs 
by Adam Sisman.
William Collins, 485 pp., £30, August, 978 0 00 855641 9
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... Sisman has now studied three: Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Briggs, leaving only Eric Hobsbawm to Richard Evans. Briggs’s widow, Susan, commissioned Sisman to write this Life, and in fact the man himself noted before his death in 2016 that if there had to be a biography, Sisman would be the right person to do it. The result is an elaborately detailed and ...

A Cousin of Colonel Heneage

Robert Crawford: Was Eliot a Swell?, 18 April 2019

The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume VIII: 1936-38 
edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden.
Faber, 1100 pp., £50, January 2019, 978 0 571 31638 0
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... the previous year that ‘sometimes you remind me of a gentleman in full evening dress and white gloves attempting to put something right with the kitchen plumbing without soiling his attire.’ It comes as no surprise when the great man announces that ‘Edimbourg is nearer to being my spiritual home than is Glasgow.’ Yet one of the many strengths ...

I adore your moustache

James Wolcott: Styron’s Letters, 24 January 2013

Selected Letters of William Styron 
edited by Rose Styron and R. Blakeslee Gilpin.
Random House, 643 pp., £24.99, December 2012, 978 1 4000 6806 7
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... literary era dominated by heap big novelists now facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest ...

Think outside the bun

Colin Burrow: Quote Me!, 8 September 2022

The New Yale Book of Quotations 
edited by Fred R. Shapiro.
Yale, 1136 pp., £35, October 2021, 978 0 300 20597 8
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... ascribed jokes and smart sayings to well-known figures such as the poet John Skelton or the fool Richard Tarleton. Jest-book-style anecdotes were often transcribed alongside more serious quotations in manuscript notebooks compiled by individual readers. So in 1601, the lawyer John Manningham recorded in what’s usually called his ‘diary’ (though really ...

Imagine Tintin

Michael Hofmann: Basil Bunting, 9 January 2014

A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting 
by Richard Burton.
Infinite Ideas, 618 pp., £30, September 2013, 978 1 908984 18 0
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... might nominate Trakl, Laforgue, Keats and Shelley (I don’t think I breathed while I was reading Richard Holmes’s Shelley: The Pursuit all those years ago); for a rare, artful blending of long and short, one can’t do better than Rimbaud and Hölderlin; and for the latter, Hamsun, Yeats, Shaw – and Bunting. Incidentally, or maybe not, Bunting also shows ...

Zoning Out and In

Christopher Tayler: Richard Ford, 30 November 2006

The Lay of the Land 
by Richard Ford.
Bloomsbury, 485 pp., £17.99, October 2006, 0 7475 8188 6
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... in Haddam, a town ‘as straightforward and plumb-literal as a fire hydrant’, where ‘tall, white-haired, razor-jawed old galoots from Yale with moist blue eyes and aromatic OSS backgrounds’ run the local show. ‘If you lose all hope,’ he says, ‘you can always find it again.’ And you sense that both he and ...